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Content Badge: Violence

Cutting Edge, but Get to the Point

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Fantasy authors have a league of their own. They play for various intramural teams, such as The Snarky Sendups (Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series), Cape-Clad Mind Explosions (Wheel of Time), Chemistry Set (Mistborn), or Space Cadets (Speaker for the Dead). Last but not least are the Gravitas Gang (Frank Herbert, C. S. Lewis). Tolkien is relaxing in a comfortable hole in the ground, still writing the rulebook. In Elvish.  With Assassin’s Apprentice, the first of the Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobb has created a team rather than signed up for one. Most…

Melancholy, Minnesotan Medicine

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In a post-progress Midwest, beside that omnipotent and mercurial god, Lake Superior, Rainy and his wife Lark have the closest thing to happiness that money can’t buy. Roads and bridges are falling to rot, fanaticism and drug use are uncomfortably common, and towns and cities are forced to scrape by in the shadow of a handful of ultra-wealthy “astronauts” who live apart while exploiting those left in America’s ruins. Yet none of these evils need deprive Rainy and Lark of their quiet joy. Rainy, a simple but soulful bassist who…

Armageddon in Slow Motion

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Mankind will end in four hundred fifty years, and its opinions about that fact may be largely irrelevant. That is upshot of Cixin Liu’s Hugo-winning The Three-Body Problem, and its sequels, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. Together, they make for a complicated, high-concept meditation on humanity, politics, speculative science, and the problem of evil. Whether that meditation yields good fruit is another question. While the events in this trilogy involve multiple protagonists, include numerous plot twists, and span hundreds of years, this review will focus primarily on the first…

Skullduggery, Published

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Skullduggery Pleasant is about as bodiless as its titular character. Notice I didn’t say “protagonist,” for Skullduggery, the skinless magical gumshoe on a quest to stop Serpine from bringing back the Nameless Ones, is not really the center of the story. He is, if you pardon the brittle pun, only its frame. The real honor goes to a plucky and wise twelve-year old named Stephanie Edgley.  Stephanie is mature beyond her years, preferring to read books and to correspond with her mysterious uncle rather than get swept up in the…

The Hollow Heart of Merlin’s God

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Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy is a well-written, but ultimately troubling take on the Arthurian mythos . Stewart took great pains to give her historical fantasy a realistic, early Medieval backdrop, but her meticulous reinterpretation of the legendary source material has an agenda contrary to that material’s chivalric heart. Through the eyes and mouth of her ethically and spiritually ambiguous protagonist, the author exchanges the charming anachronism of Arthurian proto-chivalry for a far less believable Arthurian realpolitik. The result is an historically fascinating, but morally hollow series. Before delving in, let…

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

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A Great Treat in the Mystery Genre: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie In The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley you will find a new classic in the mystery genre. From the opening paragraph (no small feat!), Bradley brilliantly weaves a web of murder, privilege, and PTSD around the protagonist and sleuth, eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce. “So,” you may ask, “is she the titular ‘sweetness’ in the story?” Absolutely not. Flavia is not your typical post-war pre-teen Briton. She has a passion for…

The Toll

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If you read my Scythe review, you’ll know that the first book in Neal Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy entranced and intrigued me. Thunderhead, the second book (not reviewed on the Forum), raised the bar even higher. I had perhaps too great hopes for the third book, The Toll.  It isn’t nearly as shameless as the screen-craving Hunger Games atrocities, but in places it looks like a bad college essay written the night before it’s due, trying to disguise its tardiness by flaunting disproportionately big (and sometimes misused) vocabulary…

Readers Wanted: A Great Adventure Awaits

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M.L. Forman’s 5-book series, Adventurers Wanted, is a wonderful and fantastical journey, in the true sense of those words. What at first seems like a simple, perhaps even naïve, tale of a boy discovering a new life surprises the reader as it gradually delves deeper into the nuances of honor and responsibility, courage and cowardice, and many other aspects of human nature.  Slathbog’s Gold We enter the story, Slathbog’s Gold, as Alex Taylor, a fairly typical teenage boy, finds himself applying for a position as “adventurer” in a book shop…

A Lonely Trip Through the Southern Reach

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My very first impression, from the first page of Annihilation, book one of The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, was not far from my last thoughts on the series. What insanity have I just stumbled into? Every reveal seems to bring along numerous other mind-bending doubts or questions about the world Vandermeer has created. The story opens with a group of nameless female explorers beginning their expedition into “Area X”, a mysterious portion of the ordinary world that has somehow, inexplicably become subject to laws all its own. Its…

Inside the Outsiders

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The Outsiders is a great opportunity for parents and teachers to begin discussions on a myriad of moral questions, from prejudice to friendship.